November 2025 - Magazine - Page 130
Mi n i str i es
OUT of TIME
Why we get fevers: The symptom that
puzzled doctors for millennia
Fevers are uncomfortable, annoying and occasionally dangerous. But they are also an essential part of how we protect ourselves.
It's 3am and you can't sleep. Sweats and shivers let you know something is not quite right. A
furnace-like heat races to your forehead, shivers and chills trickle down your spine. You feel
helpless, confused and exhausted. "It's only a fever," you tell yourself.
An evolutionary feature more than 600 million years old, fevers are a common accompanyment of a wide range of infections by viruses, bacteria and fungi. Many of us will have experienced them during a bout of flu, for example. Fever has also been a sign of such serious, and often deadly, illnesses through human history that we have incorporated it into the
name we give many diseases 3 scarlet fever, dengue fever, yellow fever, Lassa fever. The list
goes on. (Learn more about how viruses get their names in this article by Sarah Pitt.)
Despite this, humans only reached a full understanding of how our bodies produce fever in
the 20th Century.
So why exactly do we get them, should we always treat them 3 and at what point do they
go from beneficial discomfort to a serious problem?
A bit of bloodletting
Our ancestors were fully aware of the danger of fevers, and they fed into interesting ideas
of how the body works, says Sally Frampton, humanities and healthcare fellow and historian
of medicine at the University of Oxford.
"Today we would know, 'Oh you've got a fever, there's something else going on'," she says.
"But for a lot of [people] in the early modern world, and up to the 19th Century, there was a
sense that the fever is the disease."
Fevers signal that pathogens and other hostile actors are making our bodies
their home – and that we're putting up a fight
The ancient Greeks treated fevers with everything from starvation to bloodletting, both of
which were used up to the 19th Century to try to cool fevers. The big shift in our understandMalu Cursino
